Donald Manildi

DONALD MANILDI has been curator of the International Piano Archives at the University of Maryland (College Park) since 1993. (IPAM is the only institutional collection devoted specifically to pianists, piano music, and piano recordings.) He holds degrees in piano performance from the University of Washington (Seattle) and the Cleveland Institute of Music. He has made many appearances as a pianist in a broad repertoire of over 200 works. He has also been guest lecturer at such institutions as Stanford University (“Reactions to the Record,” 2007), Yale University (“Playing Chopin His Way” symposium, 2010), McMaster University (Great Romantics Festivals, 2008 and 2010), and the University of North Carolina Greensboro (Focus on Piano Literature, 2006). He is a frequent presenter at the annual meetings of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC). His presentations have focused on the field of recorded pianism (both historical and current) as well as on the full extent of the piano repertoire.

Before coming to Maryland he served as music producer for Minnesota Public Radio, where he hosted a weekly broadcast series called The Romantic Piano, devoted to recordings by the great pianists of the past and present, and to unjustly neglected keyboard literature from the 19th and early 20th centuries. He has published nearly 700 reviews, articles and discographies in International Piano Quarterly, International Record Review, American Record Guide,MLA Notes, and elsewhere. Mr. Manildi’s discography of Arthur Rubinstein appeared in Harvey Sachs’s book Rubinstein: A Life (Grove/Atlantic, 1995), and his discography of Shura Cherkassky is part of The Piano’s Last Czar by Elizabeth Carr (Scarecrow Press, 2006). Mr. Manildi’s discography of American pianist Earl Wild is included in the 2011 publication of Mr. Wild’s memoirs. In an advisory capacity his assistance has been acknowledged by the authors of nearly 20 other books on pianists and piano music. His compact disc, Pianists As Composers, was released on the Elan label in 1999 to critical acclaim. He has also produced over thirty CD reissues of historic piano recordings (available on the Pearl, Marston, APR and IPAM labels), and in 2000 he edited for publication the essays of the late pianist-scholar Jan Holcman (Pianists: On and Off the Record).

At IPAM his responsibilities include the development and preservation of existing collections, the acquisition of significant new materials (primarily recordings and scores), attending to visits and inquiries of performers and scholars from around the world, and serving as guest lecturer for various University of Maryland music classes, including seminars on Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann. He has also initiated and taught “Perspectives on Pianism,” a graduate-level seminar examining the elements of piano technique and interpretation as documented on recordings.